


started up a new thing and these were the first words

by akisazame



Category: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 04, because that is their default state, creative processes, more dialogue and foreplay in bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 08:49:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akisazame/pseuds/akisazame
Summary: The closest Nathaniel has ever come to a creative pursuit is participating in musical theater mostly against his will, so he can't relate to the way Rebecca will seem spontaneously possessed by an idea. When he'd admitted this to Rebecca, she'd quirked a sardonic eyebrow at him. "Is that so?" she'd said, setting her phone aside and turning towards him on the couch, bumping her knee against his. "You've never been..." — her hand slid up to cup his neck — "motivated..." — her thumb traced along the line of his jaw — "to get creative?"





	started up a new thing and these were the first words

**Author's Note:**

> last Wednesday I met Rachel Bloom at 2:30 in the morning outside Radio City Music Hall and, figuring I had nothing to lose, told her I write fanfic of her show. she was ecstatic. as a result, imagine me feverishly writing this while Bryan Adams's (Everything I Do) I Do It For You plays soulfully in the background.
> 
> technically post-series, though you can thread it onto [hesitations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18263792) instead if you'd like. title abridged from Midlist Author by the Decemberists.

_You love her,_ Nathaniel tells himself as he stares determinedly at the ceiling. He loves this part of her too, even when it's frustrating. And right now, it is immensely, _immensely_ frustrating.

Rebecca is tapping her fingernail on the bottom corner of her laptop in a staccato rhythm, and the noise draws his gaze back to her, sprawled out on her stomach next to him in his bed, her face perilously close to the screen. _You'll need glasses if you keep that up,_ he thinks and doesn't say, because saying anything to her right now will only prolong the situation. Instead he lets his eyes wander over her bare skin until he can't anymore, keeping the noise he wants to make trapped deep in his throat. His fingers flex uselessly at his sides. It's like walking a balance beam, controlling himself like this.

He still hasn't decided whether she's doing it on purpose.

Apparently satisfied with whatever she was measuring out, Rebecca starts typing, a flurry of fingers as she commits her decisions to virtual paper. The closest Nathaniel has ever come to a creative pursuit is participating in musical theater mostly against his will, so he can't relate to the way Rebecca will seem spontaneously possessed by an idea. When he'd admitted this to Rebecca, she'd quirked a sardonic eyebrow at him. "Is that so?" she'd said, setting her phone aside and turning towards him on the couch, bumping her knee against his. "You've never been..." — her hand slid up to cup his neck — "motivated..." — her thumb traced along the line of his jaw — "to get creative?"

"What rhymes with desire?" Rebecca says now, startling Nathaniel back to the present. He squeezes his eyes shut and swallows before looking at her; she mutters to herself a fair amount when she's writing, and he's not about to repeat the mistake of answering a question that she'd meant as purely rhetorical. This time, however, she's gazing up at him, clearly soliciting a response.

Most words appear to have vacated Nathaniel's brain entirely, let alone any that rhyme with desire. "Um, I don't know. Higher?"

"Hackneyed." Rebecca rolls her eyes and focuses back on her screen. "Not enough syllables anyway. Maybe I'll slant it instead."

Most of the time, when Rebecca has a sudden idea and has to drop everything so it's not lost to the aether, it's a quick affair. It happens most often mid-conversation: one or the other of them will be speaking when Rebecca will throw up her hands, proclaim "hold that thought!" and fumble her phone out of her purse so she can jot down some notes or, adorably, leave herself a voice memo of a melody. "Okay, where were we?" she'll say as she tosses her phone aside, leaving Nathaniel to walk backwards through the last few phrases they've exchanged so that Rebecca can pick up the conversational thread again. As of late, he's resorted more and more often to forgoing their previous discussion altogether in favor of kissing her, a diversion about which Rebecca has yet to complain.

This time, however, the kissing had already been well underway. The irony of his current predicament, at least from Nathaniel's perspective, was that he hadn't started it with any particular aim in mind. He'd just wanted to kiss her, because she's brilliant and beautiful and lying next to him for some reason; she's the one who'd rolled over on top of him, straddled his leg, and proceeded to make out with him in earnest. Further, she's the one who'd stripped his shirt off, followed by her own, followed by her pajama shorts, and she'd just hooked her fingertips under his waistband before getting suddenly distracted, her eyes going unfocused in the way they always do when she's unraveling an idea in her head.

"Hang on a second," she'd said, her gaze still fixed dreamily on the middle distance as she'd slid off of him and back to her own side. He'd expected her to grab her phone from the bedside table, to just make a note and then return to her ministrations, but instead she'd thrown her arm over the edge of the bed and come up with her laptop.

That had been at least ten minutes ago.

"Can't you just..." Nathaniel starts, then trails off when he sees the skeptical look Rebecca is giving him. _Finish that later,_ he'd almost said. As if he couldn't foresee exactly how that conversation would go. _You know it doesn't work like that,_ Rebecca would say, even though he has no idea how it _does_ work. Rebecca had tried to explain it to him, once, but the whole process sounded precarious and ephemeral. He understands more about her every day, but he doesn't know that he'll ever understand this, and if he's honest, that kind of makes him love her even more.

He realizes that Rebecca is still looking at him, annoyance painted across her features. "Just what?"

"What about, um... conspire?" Nathaniel manages. Her grimace transforms into a grin, and it makes Nathaniel feel warm all over, like she's the sun and he's basking in her. "Or maybe acquire?" Her nose wrinkles at that one, and his mind races to regain the lost ground. He can't keep the smile from his face when he thinks of it, and he shifts onto his side, propping his head on one hand while he runs a finger of the other down Rebecca's nose. "Spitfire."

"Oooh." She bats his hand away so she can type unimpeded. She only glances at him for a second when she speaks. "You're not so bad at this. A regular Rhyme Zone dot com."

"I'm good at a lot of things." When she doesn't respond right away, he nudges her leg with his foot, which she immediately wriggles away from. "Rebecca..."

"You're not good at waiting until I'm done," she says pointedly. She rolls and twists until she's sitting up on her knees, hunched over to stare down at her laptop screen, as though the new angle will offer some kind of fresh insight. For all Nathaniel knows, maybe it will. Her nail is tapping out rhythms again, slightly revised from before, and now she's humming a quiet melody along with it.

The lion's share of Nathaniel's frustration dissipates when he sees just how happy she looks.

Wordlessly, he sits up to retrieve a blanket from the foot of the bed and drapes it over Rebecca's bare shoulders. She hums, and he's not sure if it's a response to him or part of the song she's piecing together in her brain, but he smiles fondly at her nonetheless as he settles back against the headboard and retrieves a book from the bedside table. He intends it as a bit of a pretense, an object to pretend to focus on so he can continue to watch her work without making her too self-conscious, but as time goes on he's looking more at the book than at her, the two of them slipping entirely into a companionable silence.

He's not sure how much time has passed when the laptop clicks abruptly closed and suddenly Rebecca is on him, sweeping his arms apart so that his book rustles to the floor. "Hey," she says, crawling back into his lap, the blanket slipping from her shoulders as she leans in to drag the flat of her tongue along his jawline. "Where were we?"

Her mouth is on his before he can respond, hot and insistent, and Nathaniel loses himself in it for a moment, his hand coming up to graze through her hair on autopilot. The arousal he'd been feeling earlier, reduced to a simmer by Rebecca's unexpected creative diversion, instantly rolls back up to a boil, and he slips an arm around her waist and tugs her up against him before he realizes that she's now leaving him hanging in a completely different way.

As much as he doesn't want to, he breaks away from her, shaking his head. "Wait, wait, hold on a second." He gestures towards her side of the bed, in what he guesses is the general direction of her laptop. "I want to hear it."

Rebecca is not the type of person to get embarrassed in bed, especially after everything they've done together, so he's surprised at the way she ducks her head, ears going red at the tips. "What?"

"You can't just... derail everything like that and then expect me to pretend it never happened. So tell me about it. Tell me what you wrote."

Her eyes flicker down to the laptop and then away, not meeting his. "I... can't."

"You can't?" He tilts his head at her, trying to recapture her attention, and finally succeeds by rubbing his thumb in a soothing circle on her back. "Why not?"

"Because..." She sighs, looking to the ceiling like she's asking some heavenly deity for courage. "Because it's weird. It's weird and you'll think it's weird and if it's all the same to you I'd just like to forget about it and have sex now please."

She tries to dive forward and capture his lips again, but he — very reluctantly — leans away, holding her in place with the hand that's still tangled in her hair. "It's not all the same to me. And you're not weird." She fixes him with a look that could melt glass, and he tries not to laugh but is only mostly successful. "Okay," he concedes, readjusting his hand so he can smooth the angry crease out of her forehead with his thumb, "maybe you're a little weird. But this," he taps his thumb against her temple for emphasis, "is not weird. I would never think that."

"You're gonna be disappointed," she mutters, in a way that makes Nathaniel think she doesn't quite believe it.

"What? No way."

"You are! Because I'm pretty sure you think it's about you." Some kind of emotion must cross his face, because she looks suddenly smug. "Ha! I knew it."

"Well," he says, floundering, "it's not exactly the wildest leap of logic, right?"

"No, that's fair. It's just..." She trails off, her gaze drifting away and going unfocused, and for a second Nathaniel thinks he's lost her again. "It's just really hard to explain."

"Try me."

She puffs out her cheeks with annoyance as she leans back, her thighs clenching around his in a way that's more practical than sensual. "Sometimes it does happen like you're thinking. Like, whatever I'm doing will lead my brain directly into an idea. But other times it's like..." Her teeth worry at her bottom lip as she thinks, and Nathaniel suppresses the urge to run his thumb over that, too. "Like, say we're talking about... basketball."

"You have never once wanted to talk about basketball."

"I could want to talk about basketball! Very tall men are an interest of mine." She pauses for dramatic effect, and he obediently raises his eyebrows in response just so she'll continue her story. "So we're talking about basketball, and then my brain will go off on a tangent and I'll start thinking about, I don't know, some other round object, like..."

Nathaniel, unable to help himself, pointedly flickers his gaze towards Rebecca's chest.

"Oh my god," Rebecca says, snorting out a laugh. "No, not that. Well... sometimes that. Very rarely that. But no, like, basketball leads to... watermelon. And then I'm thinking about the last time I had watermelon, which was actually at Paula's house and not at a beach, but it could've been at the beach and them bam! There's a song I want to write about the beach."

"Okay," Nathaniel says, not entirely sure that he follows her logic but not wanting to discourage her. "So where did your brain take you when we were making out?"

"It's, um..." Rebecca runs both her hands over her face and back through her hair. "It's a song about my bat mitzvah?"

"You're gonna have to really walk me through this one."

"So, uh, it started with these." She motions at his pajama pants, a gift from Rebecca on his last birthday, which are adorned with little cartoon monkeys. "I went to take your pants off, and my brain went 'monkeys.' Then I thought about flying monkeys, which of course got me to the Wizard of Oz. From there I started thinking about the seminal witch film Hocus Pocus, and of course you know that my favorite witch is Kathy Najimy, who was also in the movie Sister Act. Granted, Sister Act is about Catholic nuns, but my brain jumped the tracks to Judaism, and that's how I ended up spending like a half hour writing a song about my bat mitzvah instead of doing you real good like I should've." She exhales the small amount of breath she has left and leans back in, wrapping her arms around his neck. "So now can I get back to doing you real good like I should've?"

"Wait, wait, wait," Nathaniel says, still too dumbfounded by her story to transition back into kissing her, "you're rhyming 'desire' with 'spitfire' in a song about your bat mitzvah?"

She seems momentarily confused, but then she grins, clearly pleased with herself. "Oh, that? No, I was just fucking with you."

There's a long beat as he just looks at her, the impish smile slowly spreading to engulf her whole face, before he grabs her by the waist and rolls them both over, pinning her to the bed beneath him. She barely has time to shriek out a laugh before he's kissing her, consuming her, melting into her.

They're both gasping when they break for air. "I take it back," he says, arching off of her so she can finally, _finally_ resume her removal of his pants. "You are so weird. The weirdest."

"You liiiiike meeeee," she softly singsongs, her breath warm against his lips before she closes the gap.

 _I love you,_ Nathaniel thinks but can't say with Rebecca's tongue occupying his mouth. Surely he can find some other way to tell her — he'll just have to get creative.


End file.
